This chapter is based on an interview with Keith Brown in February
2001

Like everyone else, I suppose, I'm very much a product of my background
and childhood, the child being father of the man, as Wordsworth
said. I was brought up in a farming family to be obsessively enamoured
of hard work and to be just as obsessively sceptical about orthodoxies,
religious or political. So in retrospect it's easy for me to see
why I became such a restless, free-ranging eclectic as I have been.

You see, my family was a mixture of catholic and protestant, of
anglican and methodist, in an island community where self-consciously
Manx values cohabited uneasily with increasingly dominant English
values. Indeed, if I'm an eclectic pluralist, it may simply be that
the Manx in general are. Although we tend to be a bit equivocal
and semi-detached about national identity, we're very conscious
of our Celtic roots: we share St Patrick with Ireland and we have
the remnants of a Celtic language that is close to being intercomprehensible
with Irish. I say "remnants" because, although the rudiments are
now taught in school, when I was a child there were already very
few fully competent Manx speakers, and most of us (though living
in Manx named Ballabrooie or Cronk y Voddy) only used Manx for the
odd greeting or proverb or our very own euphemism for "loo",
tthai beg "little house". But we were conscious too of Scandinavian
roots. We sang of King Orry and bowed to St Olave; we proudly gawped
at our quite splendid Viking-Age crosses with their runic inscriptions
-- some of the best in Kirk Michael only a couple of miles from
our family farm which itself bears a Scandinavian name, Lambfell.
The Manx parliament has retained its Scandinavian name for a thousand
years: Tynwald, cognate in form and function with Iceland's Thingvoll.
In the middle ages, our bishop was appointed from Trondheim and
his title still recalls that his domain once included "Sodor", which
derives from the Scandinavian name for the Hebrides.

You may well be wondering, but are too courteous to ask: What has
all this to do with my academic career? Well, in addition to underlining
this nonconforming eclecticism of mine, it may help to explain my
interest in language, history, and language history. So when I had
reluctantly abandoned school science for the "arts", I came to UCL,
eventually settling for the subject "English" because of the historical
and linguistic bias in the curriculum: Gothic, some Old Saxon and
Old High German, a lot of Old Norse, and even more Anglo-Saxon:
Germanic philology, history of language and the writing of
language: palaeography from runes to court hand.

Not that the course of my true love for this English degree ran
smoothly to begin with. I diverted some of my energies into the
lively politics of the time, and a lot into music - especially into
playing in a dance band, not least to fund nights out with girls.
The war had made my bit of UCL re-locate in Aberystwyth and I was
further diverted into dabbling in the Welsh spoken around me, tickled
that Cronk y Voddy's tthai beg was Aber's ty bach. I
still love singing those minor-key Welsh hymns -- in Welsh. But
most seriously I was diverted from the English degree by five years
in RAF's bomber command where I became so deeply interested in explosives
that I started to do an external degree in chemistry through
evening classes at what is now the University of Hull.

But with demobilisation in 1945 I suddenly felt middle-aged and
so I soberly resumed my UCL degree with unexpected dedication, enlivened
by new excitements. With the College back in Bloomsbury, I discovered
I could tap into phonetics with Daniel Jones and (just down the
road at SOAS) into a subject then just daring to speak its name
("linguistics") with J.R.Firth. By the time I'd got my BA, I was
hooked on the idea of research. Ah, but in what? It's hard now to
explain to young graduates how lucky we were in austerity
England, bombarded with tempting career offers. I was invited to
take up a research fellowship in Cambridge to work on Old Norse
(and in fact I did subsequently do some bits of work on Hrafnkelssaga
and a student edition of Gunnlaugssaga with P.G.Foote
in 1963). But I was counter-attracted by the offer (offer:
no ad, no application, no referees) of a junior lectureship at UCL
itself. Without so much as an hour's teacher training, I
happily charged into undergraduate classes on medieval literature,
history of the language, OE, Old Norse, and anything else the powers
thought I had more time to do than they. And then there was the
exciting challenge of embarking on research -- a matter far more
important in the eyes of the said powers.

At that time, there was much controversy over a now yawn-inducing
issue in old Germanic philology: what Grimm had called Brechung.
Were the vowels in OE words like heard "hard" or feoh
"cattle" really diphthongs or just simple vowels plus diacritics
indicating consonant "colour"? With great gusto, I took on Fernand
Mosse of Paris and Marjorie Daunt of Birkbeck, with the enthusiastic
approval of my supervisor, A.H.Smith. Supervision was often rather
nominal in those days, and so it was with Hugh Smith, but it was
always a privilege to have ready access to such an extraordinary
polymath: big in toponymics, of course, but big also in ultra-violet
photography, horology, and typography, to name just a few of his
interests. My research involved learning some Old Irish where the
vowel graphemics showed apparent similarities (and where the stories
from the Tain held -- like the Norse sagas -- a literary
interest for me as well). My work also involved learning some Danish
and Swedish for a lot of the relevant published research.. So it
was that I came to sit at the feet of Elias Bredsdorff, the Hans
Andersen scholar, then lektor in Danish at UCL, who could sometimes
be coaxed into telling of his exploits in war-time Denmark when
he was prominent on the SS wanted list. Despite such temptations
to dawdle and dabble, the thesis got finished but (astonishingly
as it may now seem) the controversy rumbled on, joined by up-and-coming
Bob Stockwell on the one side and Sherman Kuhn stoutly joining forces
with me on the other.

Meanwhile, teaching students OE was bringing home to me how little
Germanic philology helped them and how much syntax and lexicology
would. So for my PhD, I switched to syntax, incurring some displeasure
among the powers for whom sticking to one's scholarly last was a
prime virtue and my field was phonology, was it not? But in one
quarter the switch was welcomed. A book based on my thesis was published
by Yale University Press in 1954 (The Concessive Relation in
Old English Poetry) just whenC.L.Wrenn at Pembroke, Oxford was
planning to write an OE grammar. Because such grammars traditionally
covered only phonology and morphology, he roped me in to help write
a different kind of text book, replete with a fairly full treatment
of syntax as well as word-formation. An Old English Grammar
was duly published by Methuen in 1955.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before that collaboration with
Wrenn, I had another life-changing stroke of luck. In 1951, I was
awarded what is now called a Harkness Fellowship that took me to
Bernard Bloch, Helge Kokeritz, and Yale. I rejoiced in attending
Bloch's classes as a "post-doc" but revelled also in the proximity
(given a splendid car and the Merritt Parkway) of Columbia and Cabell
Greet to the south and of Brown (Freeman Twaddell) and Harvard (F.P.Magoun,
Joseph Watmough, et many al, but especially Roman Jabobson) to the
north. I was made to feel very welcome, and Bloch in particular
(in Bloomfield's old chair) tried to recruit me into Bloch-Trager
structuralism and teased me about Firth -- though I told him he
hadn't recruited me either. Now, actually , the powers-that-were
at UCL "sent" me (as they saw it) to America so that I could work
lexicologically upon the great UCL Piers Plowman project
that had been begun decades earlier by the then Quain Professor,
R.W.Chambers. So, after a semester at Yale, I dutifully repaired
to Ann Arbor where I was generously given a desk in the great Michigan
project, the Middle English Dictionary, headed by Hans Kurath and
Sherman Kuhn.

I enjoyed trawling through the MED's voluminous files and
managed to do a few things related to my Langland mission. I was
also briefly tempted back into OE phonology to do a couple of papers
with Kuhn (Language 29.143-156 and 31.390-401). But of far
greater long-term importance for me was the close contact I came
to have with the stars of Ann Arbor linguistics: Charles Fries,
Albert Marckwardt, Ken Pike, Herbert Penzl, Raven McDavid, for example.
I became more acquainted with the historical and contemporary relations
between American and British English and (especially through seminars
hospitably organised chez Fries) with modes of working empirically
on the syntax of spoken language. Fries had of course already done
innovative work on unedited manuscript English (soldiers' letters,
for example). But now the new electronic recording had enabled him
to do even more innovative work on unedited spoken English,
and whatever its obvious deficiencies his book on The Structure
of English (1952) gave me a huge buzz. From then on, I've never
been without a tape recorder -- and never above using a hidden mike.

By travelling round the US, I was able to establish working friendships
with many other scholars such as Jim Sledd and Archie Hill. But
I was also able to witness the darker side of academia: LSA meetings
reduced to chaos, as (surely pre-planned) vilification was hurled
at senior figures like Adelaide Hahn by gangs of young turks peddling
their current brand of structuralism against those they saw as stuck
in the mind set of the Junggrammatiker. Not a few of these
same young turks were within a couple of years to desert Trager
and Hill to become just as fanatical about TG, and in 1962 I was
dismayed to see just such fascistic intolerance at the International
Congress in Cambridge, Mass, when it was scholars like Bloch who
were disgracefully shouted down.

Not long after my return from the US in 1952, I moved to Durham,
in no small part to get away from an increasingly bibulous departmental
culture which I was not alone in finding a bit oppressive. The Durham
department, headed by the critic Clifford Leech, was excellent but
small, and everyone was expected to teach more or less everything.
There weren't many linguists around, but there were a few very active
ones such as Neville Collinge in Classics, while over in Newcastle
there was my close friend, Barbara Strang. The tiny "language side"
that I was appointed to take over in Durham had been eminent in
the cultural and textual history of Anglo-Saxon England, but while
doing my amateurish best to keep this tradition alive I devoted
myself more to convincing students and colleagues that a linguistic
approach could contribute valuable insights to the study of Shakespeare,
Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, and all stations to T.S.Eliot and beyond.
And I started seriously examining the grammar of present-day and
especially spoken English. That included the speech of my
children. One of them regularly (in more senses than one) spoke
of "a-r-apple", rightly divining that sandhi [r] was of greater
phonotactic currency than sandhi [n] (though he didn't actually
say so); and both lads contributed mightily to the series of broadcast
lectures that eventually grew into The use of English (Longman).
I made frequent weekend trips to London where the BBC had kindly
given me not just a desk but free access to all their tapes and
transcriptions of the spontaneous speech in numerous discussion
programmes. I had ideas for harnessing the then vast and clumsy
computer in the task of sorting out the conditions under which linguistic
variants occurred, and I took a programming course with Ewan Page
(later Vice-Chancellor of Reading) in his Newcastle department.
The University of Durham provided modest seed money for such things
as primitive recording and analysis facilities, and I was soon well
on the way to devising a long-term project for the description of
English syntax ("The Survey of English Usage"), described in
TPS 1960, pp 40-61. This had already received some welcome funding
from a Danish publisher, from CUP, OUP, and above all from Longman
by the time I moved back to UCL in 1960, bringing with me the infant
Survey and a research assistant.

The infant thrived and many, many people contributed to its nurture.
I got unstinting support from UCL itself, the department and successive
Provosts (Ifor Evans, Noel Annan, James Lighthill); from the British
Council, who funded postgraduate and more senior scholars to work
with me over the years (Florent Aarts, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Jan Firbas,
for example); from the Ford Foundation who brought to UCL such scholars
as Jim Sledd and Nelson Francis; from the research councils and
the great charities like Leverhulme (during one of the Survey's
financial crises, Keith Murray responded to a week-end call with
what amounted to a year's bail-out); from Longman (thanks especially
to John Chapple and subsequently Tim Rix, the latter setting up
a generous Longman Fellowship that funded post-docs from the third
world so they could use the Survey materials in the production of
English teaching materials back home).

Among the researchers thus funded, several were key to the day-to-day
development of the project. These have been recorded in annual reports
and in prefaces to Survey publications (full lists available from
UCL), but one or two should be recalled here. Jan Rusiecki (and
later Robert Ilson) took prime responsibility for what we called
the "Work-book", specifying the criteria for every single linguistic
and taxonomic decision as the corpus was analysed. David Crystal
became the lead partner in devising the scheme by which the multiple
systems of prosodic and paralinguistic features of speech were recognised,
categorised, and transcribed by experts such as Janet Whitcut. Jan
Svartvik and Henry Carvell led the way in computational analyses,
with many nocturnal hours on off-peak access to the vast Atlas machine
in Gordon Square. Geoffrey Leech's leadership was crucial in shaping
A Grammar of Contemporary English (Longman 1972),as
also its successor of 1985 - another of the many works in which
I have indulged my enjoyment of collaborative writing. Sidney Greenbaum
and Ruth Kempson devoted a good deal of time and ingenuity to psycholinguistic
techniques of elicitation (e.g. Elicitation Experiments in English,
Longman 1970; Language 47.548ff) -- an aspect of the Survey
that I have always (and already in the Philological Society paper
of 1959) seen as constituting an at least equal partnership with
corpus analysis.

All this has been acknowledged before and is, so to say, in the
public domain. Less well known has been my dependence for day-to-day
spade work on a host of devoted volunteers led by Rene Quinault
(ex-BBC) and comprising such loyal friends as Oonagh Sayce, Grace
Stewart (wife of the University Principal), Jocelyn Goodman, Audrey
Morris, and many many others. It was in no small part through their
efforts that the Survey rapidly became (and increasingly continues
to be) a valued resource for researchers from near (e.g. Frank Palmer)
or far (e.g. Yoshihiko Ikegami), and the list of Survey-dependant
publications grows more impressive by the year.

And of course the Survey has drawn on scholarship far beyond modern
Bloomsbury in time and space. From continental giants of the past
such as Jespersen and Kruisinga. From more recent continental giants
in the Prague School of Mathesius, Trnka and Vachek -- even to some
extent from the Danish glossematics of Hjelmslev. From the French
such as Martinet and Adamczewski, and from Canadians as diverse
as Wally Avis and W.H.Hirtle. Most obviously perhaps from Bloomfieldian
structuralism whether of Fries's brand or Pike's or Trager's or
Hockett's, and from a succession of generative theories articulated
by Chomsky et al. The nice thing about eclecticism is, as its etymology
proclaims, that you can choose freely and widely what you need for
a particular purpose, without boxing yourself into any single (and
doubtless inevitably flawed) theoretical position. It's a matter
of taste and personal intellectual bent, I suppose, but I have always
found it liberating to be unconstrained by the very idea of an orthodoxy.
In this, nothing would please me better than to be compared with
a linguist friend I have particularly admired, Dwight Bolinger.

The Survey took up the bulk of my time in the sixties and seventies,
but in addition I worked for the British Council, not only on committees
but on report-writing after inspection and lecture visits to Russia,
China, Korea, Japan, and a swathe of Commonwealth countries such
as India, Ghana, and Nigeria. In the only spell of sabbatical leave
I ever had (1975-6), I took in Iraq and had a memorable few months
in New Zealand. And I like to think I revolutionised linguistics
at UCL by getting money together (thanks again to Tim Rix and Longman)
and doing a spot of energetic head-hunting in Edinburgh. Thus it
was that our English Department added a linguistics section headed
by Michael Halliday and including Bob Dixon, Rodney Huddleston,
Dick Hudson, and Eugene Winter. In due course, this section moved
out of English and ultimately joined Phonetics to become the Department
of Phonetics and Linguistics. Oh yes, and there's another thing
worth mentioning among the myriad of odds and ends I busied myself
with during these years: I helped Tim Rix launch Longman into producing
dictionaries -- well, re-launch, really, since the Longman
family were already on Johnson's title-page in 1755.

I was drawn outside academia on a couple of occasions to do jobs
for Whitehall, for example to serve on a committee on school examinations
(the Lockwood Report was published by HMSO in 1964), and once to
chair a committee of inquiry into the speech therapy services, producing
a report in 1972 (also HMSO) which I'm delighted to say totally
revolutionised the profession, not least by making it an all-graduate
career. But I wish I had done more, especially in relation to the
teaching of English in schools. This was sharply brought home to
me, oddly enough, when I was appointed Vice-Chancellor of London
University (another job, like my very first, that I didn't apply
for and was in this instance very reluctant to accept). After years
of growth, the universities faced a sudden cut-back: in London's
case, I had to implement a funding reduction of 17% spread over
three years. It was draconian, but in one of my chilly confrontations
in the Senate House with the then Secretary of State, Sir Keith
Joseph, he told me bluntly that if his department had the kind of
money I was seeking, he wouldn't give it to me but to where it was
infinitely more badly needed. "When were you last in any of our
inner city comprehensives?" he asked. Well, the following week he
took me to one for a couple of hours, and the scales fell from my
eyes. In all my years as a university teacher, I had of course known
that we were selecting our students (little more than 10% of the
age group at that time) from obviously "good" schools: the quality
of intake was high, year after year. I was ashamed to realise that
I had never bothered to find out what sort of quality education
the majority of schools meted out.

Well, ever since, I've been trying to make restitution in whatever
way I could. When I was President of the British Academy, I worked
(as in so much these days, along with my wife, Gabriele Stein) at
radically improving the new National Curriculum so as to ensure
a better schooling "for the many" as New Labour would say, without
disrupting the kind of education expected of the growing numbers
of students coming into the universities. We had some success in
eradicating the emphasis on trivial aspects of grammar (such as
the split infinitive) and introducing more serious attention to
vocabulary, in the course of exposing the misplaced disdain for
Standard English affected by many in the educational establishment.

Since entering the House of Lords, I have still further extended
my interest in general educational issues to take up the disgracefully
neglected matter of education and training for prisoners and "young
offenders" - the vast majority of them male and (even compared with
our grossly under-educated population at large) disproportionately
illiterate. In this respect too, I'm trying to make up for a happy,
lucky life in the charmed circles of academia, though in another
respect it's a return to an interest I indulged when I was in Durham.
The Chief Constable was Alec Muir, brother of another friend Kenneth,
who was Professor of English in Liverpool. Alec persuaded me to
give a course of lectures for lifers and the like in Durham Gaol.
I've never had more attentive and appreciative audiences!

Keith, I didn't want to do a piece for this volume, as you well
know. In a letter on 30 June 2000, I wrote: "I have become increasingly
convinced that my own personal history would not be worth reading
and that, by writing one, I would be implying that I thought it
was."

That remains my strongly held view and the grounds for continuing
misgivings. But my letter to you went on: "In your charity, you
may well be tempted to reject my (I assure you) well-founded modesty,
but I have to tell you firmly that my mind is made up."

Well, "in your charity" you would never have dreamed of rejecting
my views; instead, you persuaded me to let you use precious time
of your own to interview me. This is the result, and I can now admit
that I'm glad and grateful that you did. You actually made me enjoy
the unwonted experience of delving into (sometimes unwanted)
memories of a pretty mixed personal past. If this were a self-assessment
exercise, I'd give myself a beta minus. Beta for undoubted hard
work and a reasonable quota of good intentions. Minus for spreading
myself, my writing, my interests, and my curiosity very much too
widely; and hence for doing far too little at far too much.